Author

Cornelia Stan

This is the first article in a series aimed at demystifying the whats and hows of continuous delivery and DevOps. We’ll be offering a fresh but clear perspective on how continuous delivery should be understood and tackled by IT leaders.

Preparing yourself, in this case, means that you and your team are in for a move – the move towards Continuous Delivery.

As in the case of moving into a new house, there a few steps you need to take. First, you need to understand the market. Second, you need to carefully plan which house to buy and how to move all of your things into a new environment. The final step is adapting yourself to the new environment.

These are the aspects that we’ll address in this series of articles. We’ll be sharing our experiences and know-how in helping companies move from a traditional delivery model – to a Continuous Delivery mindset and set-up.

Continuous Delivery is far from being a trend. It’s more a quiet and necessary revolution, meant to introduce efficiency and innovation in IT departments, and regain the time lost in fixing bugs and patching up code.

Ready to make the Continuous Delivery move-in?

It’s essential to stress beforehand that Continuous Delivery is far from being a trend. It’s more a quiet and necessary revolution, meant to introduce efficiency and innovation in IT departments, and regain the time lost in fixing bugs and patching the code. It’s a revolution that brings companies closer to the era of digital business – as Gartner envisions it.

Continuous Delivery is imminent for businesses but it’s important to understand it’s a process and one which companies need to progressively adopt a new mindset. Continuous Delivery is also one of the pillars that support the building of an Agile culture which is essential for any digital transformation.

So – what is Continuous Delivery?

In a nutshell, Continuous Delivery is the method or process used to deliver software – which ultimately delivers value, continuously.

To understand it fully, you should know that this process encompasses a few key concepts, without which Continuous Delivery cannot really exist. These are:

Continuous Integration

Automation

Continuous Deployment

While Continuous Integration, Automation and even Continuous Deployment can refer to methods, best practices or tools which are used to execute a Continuous Delivery strategy, DevOps is the cultural shift that makes Continuous Delivery possible within an organisation.

Although it can be misunderstood as a being a specific engineering role, DevOps is a way of working. It is strongly reliant on teamwork (between Development, Operations & QA), and has a focus on open-source technologies.

In order to make Continuous Delivery a reality, companies must change the way people work together and start automating.

Here’s what companies that embrace DevOps stand for:

The DevOps/Continuous Delivery mindset:

Automate everything

Accept a few failures

Communication is key

Knowledge sharing

Self-sufficiency

Continuous improvement

Embrace change

Bring people together

Turning this mindset into a reality is quite a challenge for today’s leaders. But it often boils down to just two key points: collaboration and automation. So in order to make Continuous Delivery a reality, companies must change the way people work together and start automating.

What’s in it for you?

Continuous Delivery does not promise benefits. It… well… delivers them. This testimonial from one of our clients’ is a great summary of the main benefits of Continuous Delivery:

‚With Accesa, Transformation has become more tangible and today we experience its many advantages: agility & speed, optimised costs and better quality.‘

CIO, Retailer

How about we break down the benefits?

The benefits of Continuous Delivery.

In the next article dedicated to Continuous Delivery, we’ll discuss about what IT leaders need in the process of moving towards Continuous Delivery, providing a useful checklist and guide that IT leaders like you can use to drive your Operations and Development approach forward.

Stay tuned or subscribe to be the first to find out when the second part of the series gets published.